Home Sweet Home

We’re visiting my family in Kentucky and it is so nice.  It is warm.  People are warm.  No one has flipped me off once driving. There are fields. And grass. And my cousins.  Life is good.

Grandma Update

A big thank you to those who emailed me or posted comments about my Grandma. Her funeral is on Monday — she passed away peacefully on Wednesday with family around. In a very Kentucky sort of twist of events, the funeral was supposed to be on Saturday but it had to be changed to Monday because it interfered with the church tractor pull. At least some people in this world have priorities straight :) Of course, she would completely understand. I found it amusing.

One big disappointment is that I won’t be able to go to New York City with our church youth group. I went to New York City on a “Summer in New York” trip in 1996 (ten years ago!) with my youth group and have been back many times with various groups to learn and teach about all the things in New York City that one does not learn about in rural Ohio. Urban poverty. Different cultures. Coffee shops (I had my first cappuccino in New York at the Used Book Store Housing Works Cafe which is still in operation). Homelessness. Ultra-rich people. And all sorts of other things. I lived at the Bowery Mission. The youth group will also be visiting the Bowery and seeing a service like no UU service they have ever seen. If you want the free meal in the evening at the Bowery you are required to go to the service. Sort of like food for oil a la Iraq only it is food for God. There is a big push to get people saved as soon as possible. There are a few amen-chanters near the front and many of the others sleep through the service. I can’t wait to hear what the youth think of it. Or Tricia (our minister) for that matter.

Wish I was going. But New York will always be there.

Times of Crisis, Need of Comfort

I got off the phone with my mom about a half-hour ago and she told me that hospice says that my grandma will probably only live another few hours or maybe a day. What surprises me a little is how I run back to those religious places in my life that are most comforting even if I’m not even sure I believe them. I want to kneel down and pray. I want to talk to God, not the UU God that I know, that presence that is within us and among us, but my old God that was this big guy with loving arms living up in the clouds. In times of crisis and sadness and just struggle, there is something about going back to that non-intellectual place we were when we were younger. That love of familiarity and that non-complex deity that was just perfect and loving and comforting. I guess the great thing is that the divine can be both of those things. God/dess doesn’t always have to be complex or heady or in need of ten different adjectives (the great mystery, the spirit of life, interbeing…) but the divine is all of those things and more. For me, at least, both simple and complex. Both personal and diffuse. The great thing, theologically, for me about UUism is that we acknowledge that different paths work for different people and that we are all just sort of fumbling toward making sense out of something that is truly beyond words. Beyond our words. It is nice not to have the responsibility or the pressure to systematically develop a theology where it all fits together, that really gets to it all, but to say “This divine, this non-divine, this something, is so great, so loving, so complex, that we simply cannot get all of it at once into language.”

So, Grandma, mother of 12, grandmother to 26, wife to Arnold, devout Catholic, peace, and love, and gratitude to you as you go to that which is beyond our words.